Halving avoidable harm in the NHS over the next three years and saving 6000 lives is the ambition of the national Sign up to Safety campaign, launched by the Secretary of State for Health in June 2014.
As a key member of the National Coordinating and Support Group, we have provided support to the campaign, including offering financial incentives to those organisations that evidenced safety improvement plans which would reduce harm and claims. Trusts were able to bid for a one-off payment of up to 10% of their contribution to the Clinical Negligence Scheme for Trusts.
We received 249 bids from 114 member trusts, across a wide geographical reach, by the time of the closing date on 16 January 2015. The safety and learning team assessed the safety improvement plans and bids through robust governance processes with clinical and claims input against a defined set of criteria. There were 67 approved bids from a range of safety improvement areas, the top five focus areas being:
1. Maternity – purchase of CTG electronic monitors, STAN (ST Segment’ analysis of the fetal ECG monitors), recruitment for ‘second pair of eyes’, central CTG monitoring and alert systems, remote access to tracings, training.
2. Safety Culture – a range of human factors and cross cutting areas
3. Surgical – includes training and equipment, human factors training in a number of surgical specialties particularly orthopaedics and neurological surgery
4. A&E – improving missed and delayed diagnosis, diagnostics, ‘hot’ radiography reporting in 24 hours, performance feedback on missed diagnoses
5. Deteriorating patient – early and improved recognition, electronic flags, improved management pathways
For information on the breakdown of successful and unsuccessful bids by region click here
For information on the breakdown of categories of successful bids click here
For information on the breakdown of the type of trust submitting bids to NHS Resolution and where these were successful or not click here
For information on the funding allocation to successful bids in maternity, human factors, safety culture and A&E click here
For information on the breakdown of funding allocated by trust click here
For examples of successful bids click here
For information on next steps click here
For FAQs click here
UCL Bid Scheme Evaluation Report
You can download a copy of the findings here in a report by UCL Consultants Limited: Provision of Data Analysis and Economic Evaluation of the Incentivisation Scheme in support of Sign up to Safety on behalf of NHS Resolution.
